Rather, Apple's new Touch ID system only stores "fingerprint data", which remains encrypted within the iPhone's processor, a company representative said Wednesday. The phone then uses the digital signature to unlock itself or make purchases in Apple's iTunes, iBooks or App stores.
In practice, this means that even if someone cracked an iPhone's encrypted chip, they likely wouldn't be able to reverse engineer someone's fingerprint.

This seems relatively safe - but then again, only if you trust that government agencies don't have some sort of backdoor access anyway. This used to be tinfoil hat stuff, but those days are long gone.

I dislike the characterisation of privacy "hawks", though. It reminds me of how warmongering politicians in Washington are referred to as 'hawks", and at least in my view, it has a very negative connotation.

You are still arguing about whether or not there is a separate secure coprocessor on the SOC that sorts the authentication data, that this data is stored locally, and that it never leaves the device, and that the original poster was wildly wrong with his questions and all of his questions could have been answered by knowing how to read... I've stated this same thing about 40 times now.

Not getting that after it being stated so clearly so often is the DEFINITION OF RTFM!!!

"all of his questions could have been answered by knowing how to read... I've stated this same thing about 40 times now."

And it's *still* wrong, the article doesn't describe how it works in either technical or laymen's terms. Someone not familiar with the concept of hashing would still not be able to understand how a print could be matched without storing a copy of it from reading the article. Even we're forced to deduce that hashing is used because the article never states it explicitly.

Even if you were right about the article answering his question (which it does not), the response was still disrespectful. It's likely other people would benefit from the discussion as well as the OP. A more respectful approach would be to quote the relevant portion from the article, however in this case it's unlikely that any quote from the article would have been helpful, so you might either try to explain it in laymens terms or just say nothing at all instead of "RTFM" and discouraging laymen from asking questions.

"And it's *still* wrong, the article doesn't describe how it works in either technical or laymen's terms."

And you still can't RTFM. The original poster asked if it wasn't stored locally, where was it stored. He presumed it would then be on Apple's servers (presumably, his English appears to be wretched...). So, yes, we can answer that he is in fact wrong. He never asked anything about hashing. Again, please RTFM.

"Even if you were right about the article answering his question (which it does not), the response was still disrespectful."

Yes, it does. I am not wrong. I'm starting to think I need to be a lot more disrespectful because you are still being a complete idiot about it.

"A more respectful approach would be to quote the relevant portion from the article, however in this case it's unlikely that any quote from the article would have been helpful, so you might either try to explain it in laymens terms or just say nothing at all instead of "RTFM" and discouraging laymen from asking questions."

I WANT to discourage dumbasses. I want to encourage literacy. Clearly, this community could benefit from some remedial reading classes.